It’s the end of Week 2 of my P90X experience. It was a really good week, as far as exercise commitment goes – I didn’t miss a single day of workouts, and I pushed harder than ever on some of the days.

Results so far

So far, I’m not making any major weight loss progress, at least according to my scale. I know that with a workout like P90X, with the amount of muscle gain I should be seeing, pounds dropping is not a good metric. I was going to measure a lot of my progress via the body fat monitor built into my scale, but I read in Mens Health magazine this weekend that these monitors are basically useless (since they do their measurement based upon water percentage – fat having less water than muscle – they can be wildly inaccurate depending upon your level of hydration). So instead I will be going by the “tale of the tape”. Unfortunately, yesterday was my first day of measuring my waist and other metrics, so I cannot report on any progress yet this week.

P90X stats

Chest & Back

One of the biggest improvements in this workout was my attention to pacing. I made sure to not push too hard in the first round, so that I wasn’t out of gas in the second. The tracking spreadsheet I use penalizes you for doing less reps in the second set, so I was very aware of my pacing issues. I also made an effort to push up the number of reps in each set a little bit more than the week previous. The chart is a little bit off (since it includes Week 3, which was this morning, but all of my other charts will only be two weeks) so keep that in mind.

I also did Ab Ripper X most of the way through on this day, and completed 92 (of 349 possible) reps, although I didn’t do the last four exercises.

Plyometrics

I was REALLY proud of my Plyo day. This is always a tough workout, but this was the very first time that I ever saw the end of the video! I usually ended up bailing about halfway through, but this week I did the whole thing. It felt GOOD. What was really crazy is that the beginning was a lot harder than the end – I found myself having to modify down a lot of the earlier exercises, and not quite able to get through the full set, but for the last half I was able to really BRING IT. Momentum is awesome.

Shoulders & Arms

My favorite P90X workout. I do really well with this one. My goal for this week’s workout was to increase the weight (I’m still not up to where I was in this workout when I did it in the fall, but I’m getting closer).

Ab Ripper X was another improvement. I did all 11 exercises, for a total of 145 reps.

Yoga X

Still need a lot of work on this one. First of all, it’s a long workout (about an hour and a half), so getting the time in the morning is a challenge (to be fair, it’s really only about 15 minutes longer than the MWF days, when you include ARX), but it’s a good excuse. This particular morning, I lost about 15 minutes to start when it took me forever to find my PS3 remote.

I only did about 25 minutes of this workout (for some reason, my tracking stuff doesn’t seem to have been updated). I need a lot of work on my balance and flexibility, so I am going to make Yoga X a higher priority in Week 3.

Legs & Back

Another big day – although a challenging one. I usually work out in the morning (I get up at 4:50 AM and start my workout at 5 AM), but this day I was working from home, so I slept in, and didn’t actually do my workout until 9:30 PM! (I kept putting it off). It was a challenge to work out that late at night, but it felt good.

I pushed myself harder here. One thing that is funny – the workout tracker Excel sheet I have isn’t set up for proper calculation if you do the option weight stuff on this workout, so in order to have a nice chart, I decided I needed to add weights everywhere it was possible. This ended up being a nerdy way to push myself harder, but it paid off.

Ab Ripper X was another improvement! Did all of the exercises, and the total reps increased to 155.

(The Week 1 numbers are kind of janky because of the afore-mentioned errors when done with no extra weight).

Kenpo X

Remember when I said I did my Legs and Back workout very late? Well, that didn’t mean that the next day’s workout was put off – I was up at the usual time to do Kenpo X. Which meant only about 7 hours between workouts. That made the kicks REALLY hard to do (since my legs were super sore from the night before), but I did make it all the way through the Kenpo workout (last week was my first time ever doing this workout, and I missed the last ten minutes or so). This is still a really fun workout to do. My goal for next week is to push myself to complete all the jacks during the breaks (this week I just kept moving and drank water during them, instead of doing what Tony does).

The week ahead

Goals for Week 3 are to KPP (Keep Pushing Play) and not miss a single workout. I also have a goal to complete 60 minutes of Yoga X, and keep adding reps to ARX (spoiler alert – this morning I increased my ARX reps by 11).

I’m also more nutritionally focused this week.I haven’t been following the P90X Nutrition Guide, but simply doing my usual modified South Beach (high protein, low carb) diet. I think, however, that I have not been eating enough – considering that I am burning almost 1,000 calories a day in my workouts, I need to be careful to consume enough calories, especially protein.

At the suggestion of Tankboy, I have installed the (free) LoseIt iPhone app, and I will be using this to track my intake. I have to figure out the best way to adjust the app’s thresholds for calories (it thinks I should consume a lot less than I should, although including my workouts in the tracking may help take care of this), but more than anything else, I’m hoping that just using this app to record things will keep me paying attention to eating enough – and properly.

If you use LoseIt, make sure to add me as a friend over there (my email address is matt dot stratton at gmail dot com) so we can keep each other motivated! And I’m still tracking my workouts on DailyMile, so if you are into that, connect with me over there, too.

Fitness update